


Apparitions

by eponine119



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28783767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponine119/pseuds/eponine119
Summary: Is Sawyer supposed to be somewhere else? One day his mother met a mysterious man. He told her that his name was James. That he was her son. And that he was all right.
Relationships: Juliet Burke/James "Sawyer" Ford
Kudos: 8





	Apparitions

Juliet comes in the door after work, her thoughts full of what she's going to make for dinner and replaying conversations in her head that happened throughout the day. She stops short, with the door still open, surprised to see Sawyer sitting at the kitchen table. He's glaring into space, lost in thought, radiating stress and tension. The bottom drops out of her stomach. Something's wrong. She keeps her voice light. “What are you doing home so early?” 

Sawyer clicks back into the real world, pulled out of the realm of his thoughts. He blinks and his eyes focus on her. She sees some of the tension in his body unwind. His jaw relaxes, and his scowl disappears. A dimple flashes as he says, ironically, “Boss sent me home. Couldn't concentrate.” 

“You are the boss,” she reminds him. There's dirt and grease under her nails and smudged on her face and possibly in her hair and at the end of a long day all she wants is to get out of her jumpsuit. She drops into a chair across from him anyway, because he needs her, even if he would never say it or recognize it. And she needs to know that he's okay. “What's going on?” 

He draws a deep breath and looks at her like he's deciding whether to tell her. She raises an eyebrow, because he doesn't get to be consumed by his dark thoughts alone. Not anymore. He licks his lips and thinks some more, like he doesn't know where to begin. Then he meets her eyes. She can see his pain, stark and unbearable, and she wants to pull him into her arms. Because she thinks she already knows what this is about, and she knew it was coming. 

“You know about my folks.” He swallows, and sighs, watching her. She presses her lips together and nods. He's never told her, but she knows. He lifts his eyebrows and tips his head, like of course she knows. Everybody knows. 

“James,” she says, because he doesn't get to stop there. 

He closes his eyes for a second. “My mom used to believe in spooky shit, I ever tell you that?” He looks at her. Juliet shakes her head. He knows he hasn't mentioned it before. They've never talked about this. “Haints, and fortune tellers. Angels. My daddy used to say she was... gullible.” He holds his eyes wide, looking at her. 

Juliet nods again, slowly. If she could take this pain from him, she would. She wants to reach out and take his hand, to reassure him, but she knows that if she moves, he'll be gone as surely and swiftly as a wild animal that she accidentally thought was tamed. 

Sawyer sighs again. “Every family has stories. We had this one that goes along like she met me one day. Grown-up me. One day when I was a little kid. Upstairs, takin' a nap in my room. She tucked me in and went downstairs, and this man was standin' in her kitchen. Big guy 'bout six feet tall, dirty blond hair. She thought he looked familiar. This man...he told her that his name was James. That he was her son. And that he was all right.” 

He looks away and looks back at her. Juliet nods, and waits, because she knows there's more. 

“Course she offered him up some sweet tea, and turned away for a second. When she turned back, he was gone. She told my dad, and he laughed at her. Said she must've fell asleep and had a dream and got confused about what was real. She swore up and down it was no such thing. They fought about it.” He pauses for a moment, and she knows he's back there, in his mind. “So she stopped talkin' to him about it. But she used to tell me. Almost like a lullaby. When things got hard. She'd tell me she knew for a fact that I was gonna be all right.” 

“She must have found it reassuring,” Juliet says in a low, soft voice. Sawyer must have found it reassuring, too, in the way that children trust their parents unquestioningly. But she can't say that. 

“Maybe that was even why she...” He stops, because his voice is going to break. He closes his eyes and breathes, trying to hold himself together. Juliet feels tears fill her own eyes. She's just about to get up, to go to him and comfort him, when his eyes open again, and it's gone. He's put it away, down deep where it can't get out and hurt him. 

“I hadn't given it another thought for somethin' like thirty years,” he says. Himself again. “Forgot all about it. Till today. For some reason, I started thinkin' about it and I just couldn't stop. Because it's 1975 and we're here.” He gives her a bold look. “What if it was true, Juliet? What if it was me?” 

Juliet's heart begins to flutter in her chest. “Maybe she needed something nice to hold on to. She needed that belief, for you to believe that you were going to be all right. No matter what.” 

“Juliet,” he says. It's bullshit, and they both know it. 

She isn't sure what she's afraid of. This has been what she's been waiting for, ever since they walked into the barracks and learned what year it was. He'd asked her to stay, but she's always known he was going to leave. “Why would you do it?” she asks him. 

“Because she told me I did,” he says, as though it's suddenly that simple. He doesn't have to repeat Daniel Faraday's words that whatever happened, happened. They're both already thinking it. If this story that Sawyer's mother told is true, if it wasn't a fairy tale or a fantasy or a hallucination, then there's a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation. He really was there. He really told her that he was all right. 

“Are you all right?” Juliet asks, making the leap. For him to tell his mother this, for all the things that would have to happen for him to stand in front of her as an adult and say those words, it would have to be true. 

He looks at her, and for a second, she thinks he's going to answer honestly. But he gives her his charming smile and says, “I'm fine,” in the way they both know he's anything but. 

It hurts, because she knows that he trusts her with his life. But not with this, not with his heart. Juliet nods, and then she gets up. “I'm going to take a shower,” she says. “Start dinner.” She moves behind him, where he's sitting in the dining room chair. She places her hands on his strong shoulders and leans in, to press a kiss to the top of his head. Sawyer covers her hands with his, and leans back against her, his head warm and heavy against her chest. 

Juliet breaks away, and walks down the hallway. She glances back and sees him get up, then she hears the rattle of the refrigerator door. In the bathroom, she gives herself a long look in the mirror. She's strong enough for this. She has to be. 

She emerges a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, with her damp hair twisted up into a knot. The table is set neatly, with a big green salad and leftover chicken. It's enough to make a meal. Sawyer's standing at the window, staring out. He doesn't stir; doesn't seem to notice she's returned. 

She walks over and puts her arms around him. He holds her tight, tighter than usual. “Mmm. Clean,” he murmurs, inhaling the scent of her hair. She looks up at him and wants to ask again if he's okay, but he's had the time to gather his thoughts and put his walls back up, so she won't get the answer she wants. 

He nudges her chair out for her, then goes to the fridge to pour their drinks. He returns, handing her a glass of water, and then sitting down across from her with a glass of milk. Juliet still finds it amusing that he drinks milk with his meals. It's so wholesome and incongruous. She dishes out the salad and he loads his up with chicken. 

“So how was your day, honey?” he asks, teasingly. 

Juliet nods and thinks of funny motor pool stories to tell him, like she does most nights. He nods and responds in all the right places, but he feels distant. His thoughts are still somewhere else. It makes her chest hurt, but she pretends like it's just another night. 

They don't linger over the meal tonight. She stacks the dishes in the sink. When he reaches for the dishcloth, she says, “Let's leave them tonight.” Her hand skims along his back and she opens the fridge for a bottle of beer, which she hands to him. He pops the top off and follows her into the living room. 

She curls up on the sofa, and out of habit, he moves toward his reading chair. Juliet touches the seat beside her and catches his eye. “Oh,” he says. “You wanna talk more.” She smiles, and he stands in the middle of the room and takes a gulp of his beer. She watches the way he closes his eyes when he tips it up, and the way his throat works as he swallows. Then he sets it on the end table and sits beside her. 

“Tell me about them,” Juliet invites. His shoulders are tense, and he sits hunched over with his knees wide and his elbows resting against them. A curtain of hair shields his eyes, which are focused on the floor. A long silence passes. “James?” 

He blinks and turns his head to look at her. Once again, she's pulled him back from far away. “Don't know what to say,” he admits. 

“You never talk about your family,” she says, gently. 

His face moves as he runs through the gamut of his thoughts. He lifts his head, then looks at her. “I don't really remember much. About them. Bein' a kid.” He looks ashamed of this. “Before that night, it's pretty much just gone.” 

Juliet nods. “That's pretty normal, actually,” she says. “For all kids. It's very common in a trauma.” 

“Right. Me and my trauma,” he says sarcastically. 

“Come here,” she says. He just looks at her. She nods, raising her eyebrows. Insisting. Sawyer sighs and leans against her, letting her hold him. He settles in, fitting his body against hers, getting comfortable. It's not unusual for them to end up snuggled together like this after a particularly long or difficult day. She runs her fingers through his hair, pushing it in the wrong direction until it makes him shudder and then she smooths it back down again. She needed to feel close to him tonight. She thinks he needed it too. 

He doesn't say anything for a long time, just breathes evenly with his head resting against her chest. She almost thinks he's fallen asleep when his voice rumbles, low and rough. “She taught me how to read. Sittin' at the kitchen table.” 

This makes Juliet smile. Juliet wonders if maybe this is why he likes to read, maybe one small corner part of it. She has good memories of being read to when she was a child, and less-good memories of Rachel playing schoolteacher with her and turning snotty when she didn't make a very good student. But memories are all she has now, which makes them all good memories. 

“I remember playin' outside. Catch, or some kinda ball. With my daddy. Mostly I remember... the sunlight. The feel of the ball in my hands. Taking him for granted.” His breathing roughens. Juliet lays a hand against his arm, and he inhales. “Sometimes she'd take a nap when I did. Let me in their room. Wasn't usually allowed in there. It felt all dark and whispery and off limits. They had this clock that ticked when the numbers flipped. Like the countdown in the hatch.” 

He burrows a little closer to her, and she tightens her arms around him. “What else?” she murmurs against his skin. 

“Ain't much, before that night. Mostly it's just gone. I had a photo in my wallet, but that went into the drink when the plane went kablooey.” 

Juliet thinks she might have liked to have seen it. One more thing that the crash took from him. 

“I don't like thinkin' about it,” he says. “Talkin' about it.” He reaches one hand up and pushes his hair back from his forehead. It doesn't stay. He puts his hand back where it was, resting over one of hers. 

“But it's been on your mind,” she says mildly. 

“Ain't so bad. Tryin' to remember the good parts,” he admits. “They've been gone for so long.” 

“When did it happen?” she asks, because she doesn't know, exactly. She knows he was very young, and it was sometime around now, but it hasn't happened yet. 

“Seventy six.” 

It makes her feel surprisingly unhappy. She looks up at the ceiling, glad that from where he's laying against her he can't see her face. 

“You don't gotta do this, you know,” he says. 

Here it comes, she thinks, closing her eyes. He wasn't going to stay snuggly and complacent for long. She knew he was going to come up fighting, because that's what he does. It's who he is. It's how he's survived.

“It ain't gonna change anything.” 

She doesn't try to hold on to him as he pushes away from her, struggling to sit up. She knows better. He sits back, looking at her with widened eyes, putting some space between them. The air feels cold suddenly, and she doesn't know what to do with her hands now that she's not touching him. “What does that mean?” she asks softly. 

“It means I made up my mind, and you can't stop me.” 

“Okay,” she says. It's hard for her not to react to his anger with her own, especially when she doesn't think she deserves it. She just wanted to listen, to try to help him. But he's not the kind of man who accepts help. “So you're going to, what, make arrangements to go on the sub? Make the long journey to go all the way to your house, and stand in your kitchen just long enough to tell your mother that you're going to be all right? And then turn around and leave.” It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. 

“What's wrong with that, Juliet?” he asks, still holding her gaze with wild eyes. 

“All that way, for five minutes?” 

“You'd do it,” he says. 

“We're not talking about me,” she says, because it doesn't seem fair. And because she would, in a heartbeat, if she could be with her family again. His eyes narrow. “I'm here, James. I stayed.” 

“And you're never gonna stop holdin' it over my head that I asked you to,” he says. “I'm goin'.” 

“You can't change anything.” 

“That's why I gotta go,” he tells her. “It happened. This is how.” 

“James,” she says, because it's all she's got. 

“Stop it,” he says, raising his hands. “Just, stop. I can't do this, Juliet.” The look he gives her is desperate. 

So she nods. It's the only thing she can do. “Okay,” she says, backing down, because if she pushes him even one more inch, she'll lose him. He's ready to go right now. “Okay,” she repeats. 

He sighs, and picks up his beer bottle, tipping the rest of it down his throat in one long swallow. He moves to set it down on the floor but it falls over, and rolls, trailing a few drops along the hardwood floor. Sawyer sighs again and gets up, heading for the bedroom. 

Juliet lets her shoulders sag and wraps one arm around her ribs, like she needs to hold herself together. She reaches down to pick up the bottle and takes it into the kitchen, where she turns on the hot water to wash the dinner dishes. She thinks about the year she was ten, and how her mother used to cry while she was washing the dishes, and how that was the beginning of the end. 

Sawyer comes stomping back, moving quickly and with determination. Juliet looks at him with alarm and takes a step back, because she doesn't know what he's going to do, and it triggers her fight or flight response.

His hands slide along her jaw, burying themselves in her hair and tilting her head up. He kisses her hard, passionately. Almost savagely. She thinks she can feel how fast and hard his heart is beating. The kiss leaves her dizzy, and she places one hand on the counter to steady herself when he releases her. He looks into her eyes and she wonders why it feels so much like goodbye. 

“C'mon,” he says, taking her hand from the counter and leading her to the bedroom. 

…

She half-expects him to be gone when she opens her eyes in the thin morning light, even though she knows the next sub isn't until Tuesday. But she isn't alone in their bed. He's sitting on the edge of it, wearing an old pair of boxer shorts and thinking faraway thoughts again. 

“I've been expecting it,” she says, in her calm, practical voice. She sits up, folding her legs underneath the blankets. She reaches for her nightgown, which is shoved inside the pillowcase.

He lifts his eyebrows and turns his head to look at her. “Good mornin' to you, too,” he says. He watches her as she pulls the satin garment over her head, shoving her arms through the spaghetti straps. The fabric pools at her thighs.

“All this time. I've been waiting for you to decide to go back and try to change things.” She shrugs and toys with the hem of her nightgown. A stitch or two have come unsewn. Eventually the whole thing will unravel. “I'm a little surprised it took this long.” 

“I ain't gonna change nothin'.” He slides his teeth against each other, setting his jaw.

“Why not?” she asks. He gives her a hard look. She gives him one right back. But one corner of her mouth twitches up as she shakes her head. Her voice comes out thinner and less solid than she wanted. “If you wanted to leave me, James, you didn't have to make up a story. You could have just done it.” 

“I ain't leavin' you,” he says, irritated. Juliet just keeps looking at him. She's been left before. She knows how this goes. She watches him re-center himself, burying the annoyance and letting it go. His eyes change. “Don't you get it, Juliet? You're why I gotta do this.” 

She doesn't understand. “Don't you want to try to change things, James?” she asks softly. She crawls across the bed to sit beside him. She moves her hands, wanting to touch him, but ultimately, she can't.

He shakes his head in answer. 

She still doesn't understand. 

He looks at her like he's being tortured, to be made to answer such a question. To have to think about it at all. “I wouldn't be me, anymore. Got no reason to be on 815. Never end up here on this rock.” 

“Isn't that what you wanted?” she asks. Isn't it what they all want, really? But even here, and now, there's no changing the past.

He keeps going, as though she never spoke. “Flip side of it, I don't go at all. But what if.” He stops and huffs out a hard breath. He looks at her and there are tears glistening in his eyes. “What if meeting me – being told I'd be okay – what if that's the only reason she saved me that night?” 

Juliet frowns, and her heart breaks for him a little bit more. “James. No,” she says. She puts her arms around him now. “She was your mother. Of course, _of course_ she protected you.” 

He's shaking his head. He doesn't believe it. 

“James.” 

“So I gotta go,” he says, resigned. He breaks away from her, sliding up from the bed and walking over to the closet. The door rattles as he slides it open, and Juliet watches as he rustles around until he finds his duffel bag. His shoulders are stiff as he starts tossing clothes into it. 

Juliet gets up. She goes over to him, and crouches down beside him. He keeps packing until she takes his hands in hers, forcing him to release the shirt that he's holding. He looks at her like a spell has been broken. “Let's talk about this some more,” she says, with a calm she doesn't feel. 

“She was selfish,” he says. He meets Juliet's eyes for a moment, then looks away again. He's talking about his mother. “That's the part I never – I should have realized it. All those women. I knew how they think. She was just like them.” 

She wants to tell him it's over. It happened so many years ago, and he's lived his life since then. It made him who he is. The man that she loves. Maybe that's what he's afraid of. What they're both afraid of. 

“I'll go with you,” she offers. 

“No. No, no. Hell no,” he says. The vulnerability is gone again and he's back in control. “I'm goin' and you're not and that's that.”

“You don't have to do this alone,” she tells him softly, focused on him. He's used to doing things alone, and not having anyone else to consider or worry about. 

“I don't want you anywhere near this.” 

“Why not?” 

“Too dangerous.” 

She thinks that he means his father, who she imagines was a violent man even before his last, desperate act. “So you are going to try to change things,” she says quietly, and with as little emotion as she can manage. 

“Uh-uh,” he says, and looks at her sharply. “I told you. Change that, it changes everything.” 

Isn't that the point, she thinks sadly. “But you could be happy.” 

“Who says I ain't?” he demands, surprising her. He gives her a long look. “It took me a long time to get here, Juliet. What you and me got... I don't wanna undo that.” 

She frowns at him, because this doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem real. She doesn't mean more to him than the life he's always regretted not having, the life he thought he deserved, that was snatched away when he was still a boy. It's almost impossible for her to believe that he would choose this. The island. Everything that brought him here. That's he's happy, with her, right now. Happier than he could imagine some other life might make him. 

“I love you,” she says, because what else is there? 

“I know,” he says gruffly. Embarrassed. It makes her smile, because it's part of why she loves him. With a sigh, he dumps out the contents of the bag he just packed and tosses it back into the closet. Then he looks at her again. 

She puts her hand lightly on his arm. “I don't want you to have regrets.” 

“I don't do regret, sweetheart,” he tells her. He sighs again, and looks up at the ceiling, and then his shoulders relax. “Maybe they were right. Maybe my mama just had some kind of dream. Or it really was a made-up story, something she could use to make me feel better. To tell me everything was going to be okay because she had an inkling it wasn't gonna be.” 

He's telling her he's staying. 

She still isn't sure if he should. She's convinced him – or he's convinced himself, more likely – and she's not sure it's the right thing. But she doesn't want him to go. She feels like she's being selfish, wanting to hold on to him. Wanting to keep him here when things could be different. 

They keep making the choice to stay here. Together. 

She wonders how long he's been awake. If he got any sleep last night at all. “Hungry?” she asks. 

He looks at her. She notices the bags underneath his eyes. “Yeah, I could eat,” he replies. 

“Mmm, and coffee,” she murmurs. 

He puts his hand over hers. She expects him to say something like he's on to her. But he just looks at her, and then he smiles. “I do love you,” he says. 

She nods. It's almost a relief, actually, to hear him say it. She nods again. 

(end)


End file.
